Puddleglum

I'm silently coasting semi tilted and askew like a muted minecraft boat across a moonlit ocean, floating incoherently around my house looking at the clock every half hour. Up is down and now is never and all the salt has been poured out long ago. This is what an eon feels like to a photon between galaxies.

Thank goodness for crock pots. That alone saved this whole day.

I have nothing wise left to say and my head hurts and nothing helps. I know I did this to myself. Pain be damned, right? They said double the med, so I doubled it and conquered all the hard things like I had the right to colorful spandex, and now look at me, wilting around brainless, useless, motivationless. Sleepless.

I was asked several questions yesterday during 6 month follow up assessment, I answered truthfully, and I remain free to continue sans head meds. I didn't volunteer that I triggered hard the other day and had to all-stop, and I didn't share the concerns and disappointments in my head, because I know all this is just adjusting to chemicals changing again and will soon pass (again) (they always do, this is so familiar). I also didn't mention the sad, which is partly very real and not just lopsided chemicals.

Just keep making words. Keep walking past the ennui. Keep looking forward so I don't see the bumping around in the dark. Keep looking at a teeny distant flicker I hope isn't something I'm just making up in my mind. I mean, of course it is, I invented all of this, it's the only reason I'm out here. I created *this* so I could keep bobbing on a dark ocean under a moon on a monitor.

I'm still really pissed about what happened last week, and I'm glad I turned it into a big deal. All the same, who do I talk to about it? Myself?

Some are called Lightworkers. Some are named Illuminati. Some are Alliance, some are Cabal. Some save children, some pass children through the flames.

One of us is very cynical.

If someone does wrong and calls it right, it is not right. If someone does right and calls it wrong, it is not wrong. If someone hurts another person for gain of any kind and justifies it, that is not right. If someone saves others from damage and victimization, that is not wrong. Yet we keep getting these things mixed up. You cannot hurt others and be doing right no matter how loyal or faithful you may be to your belief or your cause. You cannot save others and be doing wrong no matter what anyone else says about whose side you are on.

It is occurring to me that the ones saying wake up and the ones putting us to sleep might be the same thing.

What is your own heart saying? What is your mind and soul saying? When something beautiful and inspiring carries a sinister taint, or when something ugly and vile glows with warmth, maybe it's time to just step back a bit and ask ourselves what we just got pulled into. And maybe, just maybe, right and wrong are being so tangled up that we can't think any more and it's just easier to think what we're told by those we trust to be saying what we hoped we wanted to hear. Or, actually, those who yank our chains just right.

My own mantra is if all else fails, nourish my body with clean water and healthy foods, rest from the fray, and stop my mind so peace can seep in and refresh me. I walk away.

Lamenting the world and torturing ourselves with strong emotions over injustices is a form of self inflicting. Thinking that we are doing the world a service with our enraged or inspired overthinking is a disservice to our own health. We cannot be good for others if we are not good for ourselves.

There are some we praise who get high on the suffering of others, and I'm not talking about politics. There are some who skate above the noise because they think they earned a Place, and we give them money to live comfortably, and I'm not talking about religion. Every single day millions of us spend millions of dollars on entertainment, on an industry touting right against wrong while doing wrong against right.

There are some others thrust into places who could potentially change the entire world, and they are so afraid someone will kill, maim, or mute them and their children that they remain silent. It's difficult to stand up and say something like 'me too' when decades of evidence backs up cowardice over bravery. It's one thing to stand up for 'right', it's another thing to use it as an agenda. Stuff like that.

Then there is me. "Puddleglum, with Plato, recognizes the difference between the world of shadows, and the world with the sun."

Sometimes I find someone like me.

This is the truth behind all other truths, beyond all rights and wrongs. At 4:30, enter the clearest presentation I've ever heard for every argument anyone has ever made about any *thing* on this earth. This is a guy who is so done with right is wrong and wrong is right that he actually took on exposing a government program knowing it could cost him his life. Not just his job. His life. Sometimes being disgusted enough to step up is the rightest thing a person can do on this planet. Sometimes the only way forward is to accept that there is no 'good' around you before you can see what truth is.




Parens patriae. We are all owned.

Knowing how invasive and abused this 'protection' is, being on the side of 'right' and 'good', how can you possibly believe any institution is 'right' and 'good'? All humans are human. All people strive under duress to meet agendas. Never assume everyone around you is free from pressure to toe a status quo or keep a secret or protect their own asses. Never assume a friend (coworker, churchgoer, family) won't stab you in the back out of weakness if their world turns black.

YOU decide what is right and what is truth. Do your own thinking, research what you can, put together what makes sense, and take control of your own mind, your own emotions, your own lives. If you know you are hurting people, make a plan to change that and stop hurting people. Don't take that to your graves with you. Don't justify it and pass the blame. Don't give someone else the power to hurt people by using you as their tool.

If you want to fix the world, fix yourself first. If you want to heal someone, heal yourself first. If you want to find the truth, find your truth first. History changes for other people's futures every time we decide to make a change in ourselves and act on it.

Funny how a headache goes away when I let the words out.

experience distortion

I started this hours ago and keep forgetting about it.

Today was the good kind of brain melt. I've been in partial shut down all day, which is kinda like my brain being a roomba, kinda just bumping around, actually getting things done but very randomly and not always coherently. Since I'm kind of cleaning off part of my hard drive, here, have some random screenshots. I'll start with last night's #latenightmovie.

I don't know why I'm such a packrat. I'm like a compulsive digital hoarder. I steel my will every once in awhile and dump a lot of stuff.

I still blame Mrs. M.

Whoever wrote that script is guilty of something in real life, I just know it.

Creating worlds is like an addiction. Seeding new single player world names and resetting the defaults makes me feel like a minecraft junkie. One of these days I'm going to wind up custom building something so ridiculous that I'll disappear and you guys will never see me again.

Yes, Gary Graham actually looked at a post in my Lexxperience group. This was awhile back. I don't know if anyone else really noticed, no one said anything. I think most people are pretty oblivious.

Oh, nothing *coughcough*. Just something off a stat tracker. Move along.

I feel so cool when I see this.

Seriously, cracks me up. What are the odds that this part of that post out of hundreds would wind up next to that stat number?

I keep saying I can see back yards. Satellite view and then google street view is pretty sweet. Please figure out how to use your proxies. Or not. I really don't care. I'm just a freakazoid who loves maps. Be aware, though, that it's pretty rare to get a real street address like this, and that once I do, I can look up the floor plans and value of your home, among other things. I mention once in awhile being able to 'see' people sitting in parking lots reading through post after post on one of my blogs. If I, a NON monetized blogger can see stuff like that just running a tracker, and timestamp your day out and even know where you work or go to school, which is really super rare nowadays, then YOU need to join the rest of us here in the future and realize how unprotected your tech and personal information are from fraud and possibly actual theft.

I think the biggest surprise I ran into this week was someone not knowing North Korea buzzed Japan again this month. That's a really good article, by the way. I think that timeline of developing nuclear potential is pretty spooky.

Wild gear change, if you aren't hip yet to the mandela effect, here's a quickie.


The only problem I have with this phenomenon is that they're blaming CERN. I've been bringing stuff like this up for YEARS.

Example- I had a fit one year about what I thought was a bible quote. Linus quoted a bible verse to Charlie Brown, and it's not even real. I could have sworn that was really there. This is from one of my Surveypalooza posts.
"I don’t know why I think I remember a bible verse about a prophet telling an evil king to go back to bed for another hour so his people can get some relief, but whatever it was impressed me when I was younger. I haven’t been able to find it, and when stuff like this happens it feels all Matrix-y, like something changed, and maybe I really do remember something because my brain didn’t completely readjust. Or like maybe time travel is real and people really do go back and change little things in history. I remember when I was a preteen crawling through the hay gathering eggs, was suddenly gripped with the weird thought that when I come back out, everything was changed, and I didn’t know who the president was. That was back in the 70′s, I had never seen any scifi like that, had never seen a Twilight Zone, etc. I have a cousin who experiences stuff like that, too, said one day in grade school he was terrified because the teacher handed him back a paper with a good grade on it, and he *knew* he didn’t do that work, and walking home after school through a vacant lot he freaked out about a tree being gone, and his sister said there was never a tree there. Either he and I drift through parallel lives, or things really do change, or we’re crazy, and my psychologist has assured me I’m not crazy. Anyway, it really bothers me that I can’t ever find that bible verse. If anyone else knows what I’m talking about, ~please~ put it in my comments. Otherwise I can only assume I’m on my way to early Alzheimer’s or something. :edit: 6-3-14 Someone reminded me that was Linus ‘quoting’ to Charlie Brown."
Ok, go try finding that quote now in any context. I can't even find Linus saying it. Good luck.

My personal point of view on experience distortion (I just coined that, don't know if it's a real thing, not seeing it used much) is that so many of us have actually been through it in some form without realizing it that a good half of our entertainment industry is actually (and quite comfortably) based on it. We so readily except the weird in our fiction that we expect it. If we lived in a universe where the weird couldn't ever happen at all, we wouldn't be able to conceive it in the first place to wonder about it. Our universe is wonderfully weird, and I love it.

One could argue it's our brains that are weird (and even faulty), and plenty of observation and research has gone into reality and perception and how our brains miss quite a lot going on around us (we aren't adapted to see infrared or hear higher and lower sounds than we do, for example), and time distortion is a real thing based on drug and med reactions and brain injuries, and of course there are memory jags and all kinds of stuff. I often feel like my brain runs too many diagnostics, because I get a bit of deja vu like it's on microsecond feedback loop, or like I even just felt a time break or jump or alteration, and I know from living in a brain like this that I can't count on my perceptions to be correct about reality around me. I have also seen false memories happen in other people during or after traumatic events, and it's really quite spooky to talk to them like that because they are otherwise perfectly sane and normal and you could never convince them something didn't happen that way when you actually have 2 other witnesses kind of thing. So I pretty much take everything with a few grains of salt, as it were. What gets really spooky is when a person has two memories of one event and can't tell which one is correct. I have a memory like that from my childhood.

So the whole mandela effect thing isn't CERN, and it's not new. This kind of stuff has been going on time out of mind, and thousands of years of humanity is so full of weird and creepy stories that it seems awfully lame to blame CERN.

What I HAVE noticed is that social media makes the whole reaction cascade go rabid very quickly. Before twitter and facebook, it just went in slower motion in email group shares and forums. Now that we can chatter real time with so many, it's like ignorance just explodes left and right, and logic gets drowned out very quickly in the madness and mayhem. How many times has some jerk posted that some celebrity died and they're not dead. But so many people share it so quickly that no one believes that person is actually still alive. We've become so death-obsessed that we can't seem to share quickly enough, to mourn hard enough, like it's all some big ocean current we get pulled into. Whether a person really died or not, that current pulls so many people under, and now I'm literally hearing from all sides that 2017 has been the worst year EVER. Even mental health professionals are saying this.

NOPE. I am several decades old, and we've definitely had worse years. We're all aging, we're all heading for death's door, and the rest of our lives will be spent watching out for who dies next. Really??? Guys, I was in high school when Elvis died. There are so many stories about how he's not dead, etc. And John Denver? Conspiracy theories galore, but the truth actually really was pilot error. So many brains get so swept up in the fervor of emotional tide that we collectively develop false memories. That's a real thing. WE ARE OUR OWN MANDELA EFFECT. Besides, Berenstain/Berenstein- I see so many typos everywhere I go, like on billboards, in newspapers, and it's common to see copyright ripoffs with slightly changed logos or names. That notwithstanding, I love that video up there and I'm going to check it out some more. I wish I lived in a place like that, where reality changes from room to room.

It's all fluid. All of our realities are always in motion. There is no 'truth' that we can prove beyond the shadow of a doubt, and there never has been. I hate to agree with Jim Carrey, but we really do make up what we think is truth in a universe we can barely even see. Aside from Plato's Allegory of the Cave (that just threaded every post I ever made here with the word Plato in it), I'm not sure we're smart enough to be discussing how smart we are.

I've otherwise been in a really quiet mood lately.

What would you be willing to write if you thought it might save someone's life?

To carry another's pain
On top of my own heart sprain
Isn't so easy
When fun and breezy
Is what I'm told to feign


Playing a game that's not fair
Is a difficult burden to bear
When one is hiding
That worlds are colliding
And hanging on hope and a prayer


Imagine a soul nearly rent
Being the one who is sent
To hold up another
Who won't even bother
To get their own life unbent


Honesty is who I am
Faith is the heart of my plan
I must do what fate calls
Or I'll fail at my clause
And die curled up in my own damn


A dragon is born to set fires
And leaves behind funeral pyres
It can't be a pet
To assuage a fret
Because soon it comes bursting
From terrible thirsting
For knowledge beyond
And a heart that is fond
Of consuming philosophical briars.


I've cried for the last two days. Because dragons do cry.

Some people can sit back and let the world wash over and cry to the stars that life hurts. Others tear open the dungeons that keep our souls from seeing the blazing sun all around us.

Perspective. Or, if you prefer, the allegory of the cave.

click for cool wallpapers

I'd probably be a really tough college professor

This is my brain on antibiotics. I've gone to plaid.

I suppose I might have lost a few people in that last post.

click for 15 Jokes Only Philosophy Geeks Will Understand

I've talked about how I feel about Plato's allegory of the cave. I don't often talk about how I feel about current events in politics and religion, which I believe is nicely summed up in the book of Amos, on which I did a paper for an Old Testament class on prophets. In short, all organized structures become layered with corruption, God himself loathes and throws out the traditional feast and worship days, corrupt leaders are warned they'll be dragged over the walls on hooks like butchered carcasses, because the cattle of Bashan wreaked havoc on the populace with their demands.

People have been arguing about what and who the cattle of Bashan are for time out of mind. Years ago during the writing of my paper, I found a very rare document that described actual wild cattle that ran loose in the mountains of Bashan, with great long horns, untamable to the point where they would shred domesticated cattle to bits with their horns if they came across them. One hardly needs to go into lengthy allegory with that visual.

I have a fondness for a movie called Equilibrium, loosely based on the Orwellian novel 1984. (Funny, calling an Orwell work Orwellian, a mild faux pas kind of chuckle.) Without boring us all, it's pretty much about the literal opiate of the masses, as it were, layered with the purging of human expression. The whole point is government control.

We are living in a golden age of human expression, on the cusp of mass inebriation with entertainment being the drug, a delightful causal loop I hope philosophy students can appreciate. We are so addicted now to entertainment saturation that we don't know what to do with ourselves if we are not somehow involved in either experiencing it, fabricating it, interacting with it, or creating it. The industry pimps and pushers make money on it, no doubt, but behind the boardrooms and off the books are the unofficial content editors. One example that springs to mind is the rumored Stanley Kubrick debacle.

click to see Movies In Color

My problem with modern interpretation of any kind of truth is that our methods of revealing truth still keeps people's eyes shut, even when they think it's opening their eyes. Diversionary tactics include well-timed truth leaking so heads will turn and miss other truths right under their noses. No one wants to see what's really going on, and those who fall the hardest for 'truth' (even when it really is truth) often wind up becoming the very tools that help propel the diversions.

I stopped feeling shocked by anything years ago. Of course good people are really bad guys, or, to say it more correctly, bad guys wind up in good people jobs. It makes total sense that a judge is a secret pedophile, or that a cop is a rapist, or that a nurse contributes to an underground baby racket. Of course governments make quiet deals with drug and sex traffickers. The whole not negotiating with terrorists thing prompting homeland security to oversee and synchronize local police forces is only one of many necessary steps in a very long history of growing pains in this world. I said during a private discussion the other day that all governments arose from crime lords taking over and protecting their territories. We could go a step further and say we are all owned by one system lord or another, in pyramid schemes that go back at least a thousand years. The latest in fashionable 'truth' is that we have nearly reached that fabled balance of world powers that Orwell painted out for us. So... and then what? Some believe it must be congealed into a new world order so that we can stop all this silly continual war stuff, but the fight is over who will ultimately shape that final world order before we lock into an equilibrium state of world idealism, because idealism isn't the same thing from one part of the world to the next.

Good and bad are so layered and intricate and redefined from moment to moment that it's getting harder and harder to figure out what good and bad really are. At the lowest level, the person who praises someone rescuing ducklings or a kitten in heavy traffic might turn around and publicly mock, belittle, and treat another human so badly that a crowd rises up on facebook over one cat being abused or eaten, demanding the deaths of a person's family and even an entire country over something that doesn't warrant that kind of hatefulness at all. The frenzy of hate has become the new good, as long as hate is pointed in the right direction, whatever that is from moment to moment. Harnessed, that kind of energy drives powers far beyond our petty controls at the voting polls.

There is one truth behind all other truths- them vs us. As long as we keep falling for the them vs us thing, there is no hope for this world, no matter who you are or what you believe. Them vs us will always be the mechanism by which we are controlled. It's so simple to grasp, yet so difficult to accept. Every time we fall for the hate game, we propagate agendas we probably don't actually believe in going on at much higher levels.

"Researchers believe that the closest representation of the aurochs alive today is an Asian breed of cattle called Gaur... Photoshopped to be the size of an ancient aurochs."
click pic for the article

In the book of Amos, oppressors of the poor and crushers of the needy were called cattle of Bashan. This has been wildly misinterpreted so many times, so let's keep it simple. The untamable (above the law) do as they wish to those who are helpless to evade the abusery going on in institutionalized systems and programs. (Not that it actually matters, but if you believe in God at all here, pay attention that all the holy days and their traditions were roundly denounced by the end of Amos on the premise that they'd been so desecrated that they no longer had any meaning, ultimately highlighting that all days are holy, all grounds are sacred, and no one owns what God has made.) (Yes, ask why they're still being owned, why any religion or government would continue to lay claim to ownership of any kind. The Ancient Aliens guy said it best- religion was set up to regulate a slave system. It doesn't matter whether it was actual off-planet aliens. What matters is that control depends on a belief system.)

Let us consider that we are being conditioned to become dependent on daily crutches for our lives. One wild inconsistency I've wrestled with is an 'official' program telling me what is healthy for me to eat, insisting that I must eat like that in order to be a healthy person, but if I actually eat like that, I get very sick. In order to handle being very sick, I need medications to help me live with the problems that healthy eating causes me.

Did that make any sense? Whole grains being supported as a major food source in a diabetic guideline is a joke. Whole grains are a huge worldwide business. Coming from relatives who helped build the breadbasket of America, I've gotten to hear first-hand discussions on how tightly regulated the grain industry has become around genetically modified super seeds and the people who are getting wealthy off the monopoly over a food source (it's illegal to plant non-approved unpatented seed), squeezing out natural selection and creating legal battles over 'heirloom' planting. I see all kinds of political wrangling going on over food transport tariffs and labeling while people are starving to death in some parts of the world. Most of all, I'm watching a nation of diabetics keep shoveling breakfast cereals into their poor bodies while they can't understand why they can't seem to get some kind of control back over their lives. *I* did. Why can't they?

Gluten aside, modern grain sucks and here's why
Top 11 Biggest Lies of The Food Industry

There are so many ways we are being lied to, taken in, used, scammed, controlled, and ultimately guided into lives of self-medicated panacea for depressions and sufferings that don't need to be happening in the first place. Is it because there is a dastardly plan to make us weak and die? I sincerely doubt it. I think it has more to do with big corporations and big pharma being able to manipulate ad and product placement and target sales. No one really wants to hurt anyone. They just want to make money, and somewhere at the top of heap, someone is enjoying being kinda powerful. Life is more fun when you're powerful.

I'm not an anti-vaxxer. I'm not a truther. I'm not a religious zealot. I'm not a political activist. I do think I live in a country that won a bidding war over the brain fallout after World War II and acquired some really nice intellectual property, and that said property is being used to experiment with pumping up the populace (healthy citizens make a country stronger), and that some of the experimentation has backfired a little (one example being rumor of peanut allergies springing up from peanut product use in vaccines, no idea if it's true, but peanut product use is so handy and cheap, it's just everywhere), and it's not really anyone's fault, but yes, it would be nice to have more full disclosure and informed citizens. In the meantime, there is a very real threat of world pandemic, nuclear war, and crop failures, so thank goodness there are teams all over the world studying this stuff. I just hope they don't use the withholding of knowledge and rescue to gain power while people suffer and/or die, right? While we have power skirmishes between countries, this is a real problem.

I'm a cynic. (That links to the philosophy of modern cynicism.) (Not to be confused with pessimism. To get technical, I'm a pessimistic opportunist, ready for fail recovery on a moment's notice, lol. If my glass is half empty, I get a smaller glass so it can run over. It's all about perspective.) Mostly that means I don't trust Machiavellian types (which is most of them), and if we're going to be herding human cattle through a pyramid power structure, let's at least do it respectfully on all levels. We're all human beings here.

I don't necessarily agree with the source this graphic clicks to

The last post I made before this one is an art form of a sort, intended to communicate layered content. Just as a street entertainer will go to great lengths portraying the human condition, my blog sometimes go to exaggerated extremes making subtle (or not so subtle) points. If you are not practiced at seeing literary commentary as art or aware of the history of modern arts springing forth from the strange dark hallways of baroque-en humanity (yes, rub your eyes, that was intentional), then you probably think I'm a nutty fan just splashing around on a silly little blog.

You couldn't be more mistaken. But that's ok. If you don't get it, it's all good. I love fans. I love human expression. And now I'll add that I especially love innocence. It's so refreshing to me when someone has no idea what I'm talking about most of the time in a world where bad things go on unnoticed all around us.

Incidentally, I do believe we need world citizenship, and that we have a whole lot of growing pains to go through before dignity is a birthright over the entire planet. It's ok if you don't get what I'm really saying there. What is important is that no matter what happens or what comes, we need to care about each other, because if we don't, there is no hope in this world. Constantly pulling apart into hate camps over this and that judgmental opinionating is what makes people easy to control. Chew on that.

If this music is a drag, it's ok to skip it and go back to the other layers of silliness I sprinkle around my blog. Silliness might just be what saves our souls.

I'm not a nice person

Why is this a big deal to me?

Click this next pic for the story.

Click next for original source, and check out his statement. Also see his book here.

Again, I ask- Why is this a big deal to me?

Nice people believe that if we shut our eyes tight enough, bad things don't really happen all around us. As long as we keep smiles on our faces and follow the rules, bad things stay on television screens and most of it is just overrated hype or entertainment. I'm not a nice person. If I were, I wouldn't be doing my own writing.

I was so cynical in college that my paper on Plato was about people voluntarily choosing to stay in the cave looking at the shadows on the wall so they wouldn't have to see reality. We choose to remain blind, and we put our restraints back on our brains whenever anyone tries to take them off. Enlightenment is just a shadow we talk about- we can't even fathom what the true form of that concept must be like.

This news story today is deeply meaningful to me because I've known people who died before they could even have a chance to tell their stories, and I'm writing what my part was. Some of the monsters under our beds are the nice people who tell us to shut up and go back to sleep, or don't say that out loud, or don't write it for the whole world to read. Nice people don't like the truth being real. It's easier to just keep watching television and tweeting our opinions than it is to stand up to someone we know personally who is ruining other people in secret, and we especially daren't embarrass anyone we know who didn't save someone they could have from the spiritual, emotional, and physical carnage.

Allegory of the Cave- "When the prisoners are released, they can turn their heads and see the real objects."